Myditation App
Created By
Izaz Zubayer, Jyotiraditya Mayor, Mok Hoi Chun Hogan, Rodrigo Lopez
Project Overview
Introduction
An app that helps remind seniors (specifically 75 years or older) to take their medicine daily. For this project I worked alongside with Sofia, Xiaoli, & Baidiya.
Goal
To keep the users (specifically seniors) aware of the amount of doses per day and also prevent them from missing one.
My Role
UX Designing
Interface Design
Interaction & Prototype
Project Management
Challenges
Apps like these are very limited, and not directed towards seniors.
The few apps that offer these are very outdated.
There are too many different steps which can then lead to confusion.
Section 1
Part 1: Proposal
We propose to design a student-centric mental health app aimed at helping students effectively manage stress and anxiety during the demanding middle of the semester. This app will address the current gaps in the market by offering a personalized, niche-specific solution that is both accessible and cost-effective for students.
Problem Statement: Our users are mostly students who need to manage their stress and anxiety because they are overwhelmed during the middle of the semester.
Current State-of-the-Art Applications -The current landscape includes applications such as BetterMe (subject of our usability test), Headspace, Calm, Ten Percent, Sensera, Balance, and Youper. While these apps provide valuable resources, they face critical issues:
Costly Subscriptions: Most existing applications are premium and come with a significant cost, making them inaccessible to many students.
Lack of Niche Focus: These apps cater to a broad audience, missing the opportunity to serve the specific needs of students.
Limited Free Options: While some offer a free version, they are often limited in features, making them less effective for users seeking meaningful support.
Privacy Concerns: Users are increasingly concerned about the privacy of their mental health data. Existing apps may not adequately address these concerns. Many apps do not provide personalized experiences, potentially hindering their effectiveness.
Proposed Approach
To address these issues, we propose the following strategies:
Personalization Features: Develop a robust system that allows users to customize their experience, tailoring resources and tools to their specific needs and preferences.
Niche Market for Students: Implement a free version of the app available exclusively to students with valid IDs, ensuring accessibility to those who may not have the means to pay for premium subscriptions.
Local Data Storage:Design the app to securely store user data locally on their device, minimizing privacy concerns and instilling trust in the user base.
Usability and Accessibility Focus: Prioritize the design for usability and accessibility, ensuring an intuitive and inclusive experience for all users, regardless of their level of tech-savviness or abilities.
Conclusion
By focusing on the specific needs of students and addressing the current limitations in the mental health app space, our project aims to provide a valuable, accessible, and personalized resource for managing stress and anxiety during the demanding middle of the semester. We believe that this student-centric mental health app has the potential to make a meaningful impact on the well-being and academic success of students across various educational institutions.
Part 2: Usability Test
Overview
This document outlines the test plan and presents the outcomes of a usability assessment carried out for BetterMe Mental Health. The objective is to engage a minimum of four users (with a maximum of two participants from the CMPT 363 course) in the test. The gathered data will be employed to evaluate the attainment of usability objectives, encompassing effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction with the interface. The observations gleaned from this evaluation will serve as a foundation for gauging user performance and satisfaction levels, thereby informing subsequent design iterations.
Executive Summary
The fundamental functionalities of BetterMe encompass breath exercises, sleep stories, relaxing sounds, and meditation activities. Our usability assessment centers on evaluating the playback and customization interfaces within these features, along with assessing the overall navigation and screen flows across the application. To facilitate this evaluation, we've selected a combination of typical actions from these interfaces for each usability task. This ensures that users navigate between features during the test. After completing the usability tasks, participants will provide feedback and data through a questionnaire.
Uncover Design Inconsistencies and Usability Challenges: This entails identifying potential areas of difficulty or inconsistency within the user interface and content sections. Possible issues may encompass navigation errors (e.g., challenges in locating functions, excessive steps to perform a task, deviations from recommended screen flow), presentation errors (e.g., difficulty in finding and correctly acting upon desired information on screens, selection errors due to labeling ambiguities), and control usage problems (e.g., incorrect utilization of toolbars or entry fields).
Identify Usability Concerns: The primary aim is to pinpoint any usability challenges, obstacles, or discomforts that users may encounter while interacting with the product.
Evaluate User Efficiency: Gauge how swiftly users can complete tasks using the product. This involves measuring task completion time and the number of steps involved, with data collected from screen recordings.
Validate Design Choices: Confirm whether design elements such as layout, navigation, and visual components effectively serve user needs and are intuitive.
Assess Specific Features or Workflows: Concentrate on testing particular features, functions, or workflows to ensure they align with user expectations and requirements.
Methodology
Participants are going to be tested in a closed room with no noise so as to provide a calm environment to test a mental health app. No specific tools are needed for the interaction as the participant will be using their own smartphones.
Before the test, demographic information from each participant will be gathered, which may include details such as name, age, gender, previous experience with mental health apps. After the test ends, participants will be asked to complete a satisfaction assessment and suggestions questionnaire.
Participants
To meet the stated requirements, the team will select 4 participants who are currently Simon Fraser University's students and community members, aged between 19 and 53, and have some level of experience with meditation apps. Each participant has been carefully selected to represent a unique persona, each with specific goals, frustrations, and scenarios. This diversity allows for a comprehensive evaluation of the application's usability and acceptability across a range of user experiences. Due to the ongoing university strike and subsequent closure of classes, we were restricted to a group of only four individuals. Interestingly, the inclusion of a non-student participant provided a unique perspective that enriched our observation process. Despite the presence of a non-student, our primary focus remained on the students.
The participants will engage in performing a series of task scenarios meant to represent typical interactions and their familiarity with meditation apps, ensuring a realistic evaluation of their interaction with the interface. Their objective is to complete these tasks in a manner that is both efficient and timely. Additionally, they will offer feedback concerning their experience with the user interface, focusing on its usability and acceptability. Participants will be explicitly encouraged to provide candid opinions about the application's usability and will take part in post-session questionnaires and debriefing.
Procedure
Participants will take part in the usability test using their smartphones running on either iOS or Android with the application version 7.10.0 and supporting software. The participant's interaction with the application will be monitored by the facilitator seated in the same location. Note-takers and data logger(s) will monitor the sessions in person.
The facilitator will brief the participants on the application and instruct the participants that they are evaluating the application, rather than the facilitator evaluating the participant. Participants will sign an informed consent that acknowledges: that participation is voluntary, and that participation can cease at any time. The facilitator will ask the participants if they have any questions.
The participants will be asked to complete a pretest demographic and a background information questionnaire to understand their demographics and their technical background.
The facilitator will explain that the amount of time taken to complete the test task will be measured and that exploratory behavior outside the task flow should not occur until after task completion. At the start of each task, the participant will read aloud the task description from the printed copy and begin the task. Time-on-task measurement begins when the participant starts the task.
The facilitator will instruct the participant to 'think aloud' so that a verbal record exists of their interaction with the application. The facilitator will observe and record observations of user behavior, user comments, and system actions.
Participants will be asked to complete a questionnaire after completing all the usability tasks. The facilitator will ask questions from the satisfaction assessment and suggestions questionnaire and ask participants to expand on their answers when necessary.
Usability Tasks
Due to the range and extent of functionality provided in a selected application, and the short time for which each participant will be available, the tasks are the most common and relatively complex of available functions. The tasks are identical for all participants of a given user role in the study.
Setting the app up: Have the user open the app for the first time and complete the app set up without creating an account. Users will complete a short survey that checks what users need and are interested in. This task is important since every user will go through this process at least once.
Take a deep breath: Get users to try the breath feature for two minutes. After one minute, instruct them to turn off the haptic feedback (vibration) and change the voice type. We selected this task because the breath feature is one of the core exercises in BetterMe. This task tests its customization interface.
Search for activities: Have the users quickly navigate between activities in different locations. They should complete the activity partially then exit it to find the next one. This tests the aesthetic and navigation speed of BetterMe's interface. Do users get lost or stuck at any point during the task? Do they navigate screen flows correctly?
Listen to the relaxing sounds: Have the user play some relaxing sounds in the mixing sounds feature. This feature allows users to mix multiple sounds together. The user should use the interface to play only one sound. This tests how clear the behavior of the mixing sounds feature is to the user. Are the controls and options clear and understandable? Is there any initial confusion from the user?
Test Environment: The test is done on an Iphone with BetterMe: Mental Health installed. The app will have the free trial activated to give users full access to the app. Users do not create accounts so they can complete the initial start up survey.
Usability Metrics
Usability metrics refers to user performance measured against specific performance goals necessary to satisfy usability requirements. Task completion success rates, error rates, and subjective evaluations via questionnaires, etc. can be used.
Subjective feedback on features: Comments from users on what made core features like relaxing sounds or breathing exercises easy/difficult to use. We will collect comments through open ended questions in the questionnaire. This will be useful in identifying design flaws or bugs in BetterMe's interfaces.
Overall impression of BetterMe: A 1-7 rating on how easy/difficult it was to use BetterMe overall. Will be collected through Likert scale questions in the questionnaire. When combined with the metric above, we can measure the impact design flaws and bugs have on the user's overall experience.
Subjective feedback on navigation and screenflow: Comments from users on what made finding features easy or difficult. Data will be collected through open ended questions in the questionnaire. This will be useful in identifying design flaws or bugs in BetterMe's screen flows and navigation.
Subjective feedback on aesthetic and design: Comments from users on what they thought of the aesthetic of BetterMe. Will be collected through open ended questions in the questionnaire. This will help determine whether the layout and aesthetic of the interface help/hinder user's tasks.
Key Observations
We have recorded the audio and phone screen during the tests. Participants spent approximately 20 to 25 minutes on the whole test, including both the testing and interviewing parts. Several different types of issues discovered during the usability test are discussed below.
First of all, besides the app set-up task, participants have spent the most amount of time searching for specific activities, ranging from 3 to 7 minutes. In the interview, participants found that searching for specific activities was relatively more difficult than the other tasks. They mentioned that the descriptions of the widgets and options within the “Discover” tab were not very clear, and it was not so easy to understand what was within them. Furthermore, participants showed that they were confused by the difference between different groups and subgroups within the tab, especially the “Single” and “Course” widgets.
Secondly, participants were confused by the inconsistent setting of the sound. In the last part of the test, participants were required to listen to some relaxing sounds, and if the sounds seemed garbled, they might need to fix them. They found that the soundtrack kept stopping when dragging the volume bar. Also, the sleep sounds provided access to a pop-up, while the relaxing sounds did not do the same. The inconsistent functionality led to further confusion.
Thirdly, the user interface design of BetterMe is not compatible with all ages. The font size is too small for some of the participants. Moreover, there are no ways for them to edit or set up their preference settings. These accessibility issues were distracting, but did not confuse the user necessarily.
Furthermore, participants had different complaints while working on the survey set-up task. Participants mentioned that this task took too long to set up. Statistically, participants spent around 6 to 8 minutes on the setup task, which took almost 35% of the duration of the test. Moreover, some of the participants were unhappy because they were disturbed by reviews or advertisements of the app that appeared fake. Lastly, there seems to be no relationships between each question. Participants mentioned a lack of dynamic adaptability according to how the user answered as the set-up task progressed. Some of the questions posed by the app were irrelevant given the participants' previous answers.
However, participants still appreciated some of the interface design. They mentioned that the graphics are good, especially because there are lots of animations included in every tab. Also, the consistency between the interface of BetterMe and different famous software or devices. One of the participants mentioned that the user interface of BetterMe is not very intuitive, however, the tab-based layout being similar to Instagram helped them to get used to the design.
Interpretation of results
Based on the observations above in the usability and the questionnaire interview, we have observed a variety of serious problems within the BetterMe app. At the same time, the participants largely appreciated the design of the user interface and felt that it was clean. The muted colours were said to be calming, while the slow-moving background animations were fun without distracting from functionality. Overall, the app provides an attractive exterior but some design decisions related to functionality and organization leave the user feeling lost and/or frustrated.
Primarily, participants were having difficulties searching for specific activities. This issue is a combination of the helping users with errors, and aesthetic and minimalist design heuristics. The design of the Discover tab is too complicated, with different important features being hidden. Most importantly, the descriptions of groups and subgroups are unclear.
The first important change we would make to the design of the system is to redefine the “Discover” tab. During the usability test, most participants were confused by the definition between “Courses” and “Single”, as “Single” provides a single exercise and “Courses” is providing a whole course. The change we would make here is to combine “Single” into “Courses”, since they have similar functionality, and provide freedom for users to access specific exercises in Courses. The exercises could be further categorized by the mental health issues they are meant to address (anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia).
Furthermore, a major problem in this system that may confuse users is a lack of Consistency and standards. For example, the inconsistent setting of sounds between “Sounds” and “Sleep” tabs emerged as a pattern throughout all the tests. The change we would make here would be to ensure any time a sound is playing from the app, the same controls are available, regardless of which tab the sound originates from. Furthermore, a bug identified by some participants was that using the in-app volume controls in the “Sound” tab would inadvertently pause the sound and confuse the participant. This is inconsistent with how volume controls typically work, so a possible fix would be to ensure sounds continue playing while volume controls are changed.
Moreover, this system's lack of flexibility and efficiency for users is also a serious problem that may affect users' experience. This includes the font size, which is not accessible to all users, and the inability to mute the background music unless the phone's external volume buttons are used. So, one of the changes we would make is to provide a “Settings” menu for users to set up the app to their liking. For example, providing options to set up the font size, volume setting, and dark and light mode within the application. Also, we would provide flexibility and efficiency for users to place their favorite activities into a widget on the app's homepage. This would improve the efficiency for users and lead to an enhanced experience.
Summary & Conclusions
In this usability test, our team evaluated the BetterMe application through a series of representative task scenarios to assess its usability and acceptability. We selected tasks that encompassed a range of functionalities, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation within the limited time available for each participant. These tasks included initial app setup without creating an account, experiencing the core breath feature with customization options, navigating between activities, and exploring the mixing sounds feature. The test was conducted on an iPhone with the free trial activated to provide participants with full access.
Throughout the test, we employed usability metrics, including task completion success rates, error rates, and subjective feedback collected through questionnaires. Key observations revealed notable insights. Participants encountered challenges in searching for specific activities, citing unclear descriptions and difficulties in understanding tab contents. Additionally, inconsistencies in sound settings caused confusion, particularly when adjusting the drag bar. Some participants expressed difficulty with font size and a lack of preference settings customization.
The initial app setup task proved time-consuming, taking up a significant portion of the testing duration, primarily due to participant concerns over reviews and advertisements. They emphasized the need for dynamic adaptability based on user responses. However, participants commended the application's graphics and animations, appreciating the familiarity of the interface with other popular software and devices. While some found the interface less intuitive, the tab design was likened to Instagram, aiding in familiarity. Overall, the usability test provided valuable insights into the strengths and areas for improvement in the BetterMe: Mental Health application, offering a foundation for enhancing user experience and functionality.